Sunday, March 17, 2013

Letting the Newspapers Tell the Story

When a newspaper story provides an unexpected detail about a
family member’s history, sometimes there is no recourse but to seek further
newspaper reports to fill in the story’s blanks. That was the case with Leon S. Bean’s 1928 obituary, which we questioned yesterday.

The trouble with stumbling upon family history details dated in
the middle of a decade is just that: it’s a long way until the next census.
Searching city directories might sometimes help to fill in the blanks for a
year like 1928, but can often be spotty—especially if a person has just moved
to the area, or there is no directory published, or currently existent, for the town
in question.

In the case of Samuel Bean—the blind and deaf son of Leon
Bean, mentioned in that 1928 obituary—the town of residence was listed as Boston. As luck would
have it, the 1928 city directory for the City of Boston is available online at Ancestry.com,
so I took a look there.

No Sam.

Granted, the obituary for his father was written in November
of the year, so perhaps Sam had arrived in that city before November, but after the directory was published.
Perhaps the 1929 directory would help?

Nope.

Of course, often folks living in outlying towns refer to
their geographic location by the name of the metropolis rather than the
relatively unknown village’s name. However, I’m not sure I’m willing to do an
in-depth study of all the population centers near Boston in hopes of finding someone with a
surname as common as Bean.

There is another approach I can use, though. At least this
is the one I will try for now. Since Sam seemed to be a community favorite in
the Berkeley area during his tenure at the California School for the Blind and Deaf, there are
many more newspaper articles I can access.

Some of those reports are barely mentions of his name,
nothing more. Others provide a bit of color about his personality or current
challenges at school. I’ll start with the more substantial news reports and
work my way through those first.

One, for instance, that I found on a recent research trip to
Sam’s native Redwood City,
mentions some details about his marriage to Maud Woodworth. While it predates Leon’s
obituary by several years, it is a sufficient starting place right now, in our
quest to figure out more about this unique student.

As I’ve mentioned before about the Schellens Collection
transcriptions, the difficulty with this secondary source is the transcriber’s
use of ellipses. I will, at some point, need to access the source for the
transcription and see if that original newspaper article included more details
germane to our purposes.

In the meantime, it will suffice to add this bit of
information from the Redwood City,
California, Standard, published on January 13, 1921:

Samuel W. Bean, well
known deaf and blind poet and former Redwood City boy, was married last Friday
in Berkeley to Miss Maud M. Woodworth of Irwindale, Los Angeles county. Mrs.
Bean was an instructor in the California
School for the Deaf and Blind at Berkeley when Bean was a
student there and was his teacher for two years before he graduated in 1919.
She laughingly said, following the wedding, that she had elected herself to be
his permanent guide for life, taking the place of Fred Streiff, a close friend
and constant companion during the time when the blind and deaf poet was selling
his poems among booksellers. Mrs. Bean became interested in teaching the blind
when she was a girl on the orange grove of her father, who is also blind and
with whom she was a steady companion for many years. She came to Berkeley a little over
two years ago and entered the blind and deaf school as a teacher.... Bean was
sixteen years old at the time of being struck with a baseball at Palo Alto which rendered
him unable to hear or see.... His purpose, Bean says, is to sell his poems
through booksellers and gather sufficient funds to culminate the ambition of
his life, the opening and operating of a broom factory to be run entirely by
the blind....

Photograph above: Samuel W. Bean and his wife, the former Maud M. Woodworth. Undated portrait, most likely from the 1920s, now in the possession of the author.

She says the school moved from Watertown, MA to Allston. Watertown is a town outside of Boston. She says A. Graham Bell's wife was deaf and Bell worked on ways to help the deaf, including primitive electtronics.

I've heard about the reasons behind Bell's development of the telephone, and knew his interest in the deaf, but didn't know it was regarding his wife. Interesting. I'll have to track the history of that school and see when the move was made.

Lastly she thinks it is possible Sam's wife continued her education at the Clarke School in Northamton, MA. A G Bell was working on hearing devices like aids when he invented the telephone. His mother was also deaf in addition to his wife.

They could not have been Boston long, if they were there, because they ate listed in the Alameda County city directory (SanFran) in 1928 and in Oakland in the 1930 US census. I suspect IF they were in Boston when called home for the funeral, the repotrter writing the obit was misunderstood when they asked something like "where are you from?" and not "Where do you live?"

This is such a tear-jerker! What a story. The fact that he is married to someone who loves him and will care for him is phenomenal. He is proud of his poems, and wants to sell them to own a broom factory. My heart goes out to him. In the photo he looks very handsome and also very serious.

What is interesting to me about this story, Mariann, is its multi-generational impact. Of course, that scope is broader than I can attempt here, but I really believe the many experiences Sam went through--both unfortunate and redeeming--had an impact on lives through the next two generations as well.

About Me

It is my contention that, after a lifetime, one of the greatest needs people have is to be remembered. They want to know: have I made a difference?
I write because I can't keep for myself the gifts others have entrusted to me. Through what I've already been given--though not forgetting those to whom I must pass this along--from family I receive my heritage; through family I leave a legacy. With family I weave a tapestry. These are my strands.